Christopher-
Point taken. Is there an article somewhere discussing the differences in media reporting between various european countries?
I've found most general media-related articles on Wikipedia sorely lacking, but that may have changed. (Just checked: [[mass media]] is still crap.) We have fantastically detailed articles about individual publications, though ..
So we host the photo but don't include it with the article, but on a separate instance (machine) that is easily accessible.
It's a regularly uploaded image. You can do this with any image file by typing [[Media:name.jpg]].
Do we provide thumprints?
In these cases, probably not.
What's truly gained? I mean, having a link to an image and the image itself are fairly the same.
Not if the image has a very strong shock value to the vast majority of viewers. http://goatse.cx is one notorious example, see [[shock site]] for others. But I agree that the penis picture should be displayed inline. As I said before, my standard is: is it almost universally offensive? If yes, link to it. If no, show it inline. The only other standards that I can think of are 1) legality, 2) encyclopedic relevance.
Regards,
Erik